Is Gay Marriage a Moral Issue or a Civil Liberties Issue?

The battle for the family is heating up with one of the most important issues that could cause a huge tipping point in culture - the redefining of marriage by the Supreme Court.

Can marriage be defined only as a legal relationship between one man and one woman, or can it exist between two consenting adults of the same gender?

Can marriage be defined only as a legal relationship between one man and one woman, or can it exist between two consenting adults of the same gender? In 2008, California voters defeated a proposed amendment that would redefine marriage. However, since the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Windsor (2013) the federal government now recognizes same-sex marriages performed in the U.S. states where they are legal. In 2013, nine states recognized same-sex marriage. Now, thirty seven states recognize same sex marriage and the majority of the population now favor recognition of gay marriage.

It's not a sin to be a black person or live as a black person according to the Bible. However, the Bible is very explicit about homosexuality as being a sin. So the idea of comparing this to a civil liberties issue is not comparing apples to apples. If you remove the moral issue and you operate totally as a secular society then perhaps you can argue this issue purely on a civil basis, which is where our nation has evolved to. However, it's a slippery slope, because then you must recognize civil liberties of polygamists, pedophiles, and any other form of aberrant behavior among people who want equal access and want to be treated equally without moral consideration.

Should we legalize sodomy or sexual abuse of a child? Why would we not think of such a thought? It's because we believe we are dealing with a moral issue. What if a parent and a child are consenting? Just because immoral behavior takes place by two consenting people does not make it ok.

What is the basis from which we derive our moral compass?

For 200 years America's moral compass has been rooted in the Bible. The New England Primer was a tool to teach first graders. It was first introduced in 1690 and taught for 200 years in America, until 1900. The Alphabet was taught with Bible verses that begin with each letter of the alphabet. Lessons had questions about the Bible and the Ten Commandments.

The leadership in our nation and the growing liberalism of our population is a sign of a nation that has lost its moral compass. Amazingly, 94% of all the quotes of the Founders who wrote our founding documents had their origin in the Bible, which shows the importance of God's word in their lives and of this nation's founding. So, the moral compass was the Bible for two hundred years but it is no longer. We are now a secular society with some Bible verses and God-talk sprinkled on our currency and government buildings.

When the Defense of Marriage Act was signed in 1996, only 25% of the American public supported same-sex marriage; support has increased gradually ever since. California's Proposition 8, passed 52%-48% by voters after a controversial campaign in 2008, has been declared unconstitutional by two federal courts but remains in litigation;polling in 2012 shows 59% of California voters approve of same-sex marriage. National polls show supporters of gay marriage first achieved a majority in 2010.

Mainline Protestants have shifted their views too. In 2003, 42 percent were in favor of gay marriage and 45 percent were opposed. Now, it's 52 percent in favor and 36 percent against. Black protestants are edging in that direction, but are still opposed in significant numbers, with 35 percent in favor and 52 percent against, up from 25 percent in favor and 65 percent against in 2003. The polls make it clear that younger evangelicals support gay marriage in larger numbers than their elders, but the exact number of supporters is still uncertain.[i]

Public opinion on same sex marriage and unions in the United States thus reveals a great deal of change in a short period of time and significant regional disparity. While New England, the Pacific Coast and northern Middle Atlantic states may support full-fledged marriage, comparisons of polling from a decade past to today reveals significant growth in support for same sex marriages and civil unions in those regions. Meanwhile polling from other regions show that while support for same sex marriages or civil unions have increased across the country, the growth of support is not uniform, with a significantly lower level of support occurring in the Deep South compared to the rest of the country. Given the wide diversity of opinions within the U.S., many supporters of same sex unions believe that the most accurate way to discuss support for same sex unions in the United States is on a state-by-state or region-to-region basis. [ii]

Tim Keller, a nationally recognized pastor in New York City explained that "you can believe homosexuality is a sin and still believe that same-sex marriage should be legal." This is the argument that some religious conservatives are already beginning to make, and looks likely to be the position that most evangelicals end up settling on. Articles on changing attitudes among GOP youth illustrate the move toward separating government-sanctioned marriage and church-sanctioned marriage.[iii]

My experience at Harvard with the gay community

In the Spring of 2011 I was part of a group of ten speakers at a conference at Harvard University. Within two weeks of the announcement of our conference the gay community came against us in full force. They did not want Christians on the campus. Their reason was that they believed we would bring bigotry and hate to their campus. Our conference was on the topic of social transformation and had nothing to do with the gay agenda. I personally was slandered over the internet. They tried to connect me to anti-gay legislation in Uganda. They did this because I had visited Uganda and the pastor that hosted me had been involved in the legislation. So they concluded that I was supportive of that legislation. I was not.

At the conclusion of our conference we invited several of the gay activists to meet with us and tell us why they were so against us. We calmly listened to their accusations which had no basis of truth. I explained my position about the Uganda legislation. The man who spread lies about me said, "I wrongfully judged you. Would you like me to publish a retraction in the Harvard paper?" "Yes, that that would be great. Thank you," I said.

During our two day conference one of the Harvard professors attended all of our meetings. At the conclusion of our time we all shook hands and we were very respectful to one another. We didn't agree on certain issues, but we respected the right to have an opinion. These activists experienced a different type of Christian. One that was willing to dialogue about the issues. The gay community concluded that we were not like the rest of the Christian community that was close minded and judgmental. We still held our beliefs about what the Bible says about being gay, but we could have a healthy discussion about it and love them as people made in the image of God deserving respect.

At the conclusion of our time the professor that moderated our discussion turned to the gay activists and said, "Gentlemen, I have just gone through the entire conference and never heard one negative comment about gays. I found nothing offensive about anything they said all weekend. We would welcome this group anytime on the Harvard campus."

I find that the gay community, as well as the Christian community, hold certain biases against one another that's based on past behaviors of each with extreme judgmental altitudes. I believe many gays truthfully believe their lifestyle is a lifestyle they were born with by God. And, I believe they must justify their behavior in order to explain their behavior in a way that they can accept themselves as well as gain acceptance from others. To classify their behavior as sinful is very different than classifying it as the way I was made.

Jesus hung out with sinners, even homosexualsWhile Jesus was having dinner at Matthew's house, many gays and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples (Matthew 9:9, 10). No, that is not what the scripture said. It was tax collectors Jesus hung out with. Which of the two did what his father wanted?" "The first," they answered. Jesus said to them, "Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you (Matthew 21:31).

Let's face it, Jesus got a lot angrier at Pharisees than He did at those living a sinful lifestyle. When Jesus saved the prostitute from being stoned He didn't discount her sin, He just told her to "go and sin no more." My guess is that if Jesus were living today He would befriend gays to let them experience His love personally in hopes they might embrace God's love instead of Satan's counterfeit love. The Christian community has failed to embrace Jesus' model for helping and loving those who, in many cases, don't think they need Christ or a different lifestyle. We all believed that before we embraced Christ. Unfortunately, when we embrace a life of sin, no matter what sin it is, we fall into deception. Moral compromise always leads to deceit.

The gay community has adopted the position, " You will accept us whether you want to or not!" The gay community seeks acceptance from the straight community, the politicians, and God. The problem is, they want endorsement of a lifestyle versus acceptance of them as people deserving mutual respect. There is a big difference between these two concepts. Christianity cannot, nor should it, condone sin in whatever form it is expressed. However, no sin is worse than another in the eyes of God. God hates pride, religion, pornography, divorce, and homosexuality. But He never hates individuals. He does hate sin. There is no hierarchy on sin as some in the Christian community seem to express by their extreme condemnation of gay people. The church is failing to demonstrate love partly because we think loving a gay person is an endorsement of their lifestyle. Somehow Jesus was able to separate a person's sin and their value as an individual in how He related to them. This is something we in the church struggle to do.

How we got here

Playboy magazine ushered in a sexual revolution when the first issue came off the press in 1953. A new "anything goes" mind-set about sex was introduced. This sexual revolution gained more and more acceptance in the sixties and seventies during the Woodstock generation and the Vietnam War. More and more people began living together, and premarital sex was no longer considered taboo but actually an accepted practice. Dysfunction in families began to grow as the numbers of divorces rose, unrestrained sexual liberties were expressed, and fathers abandoned their families, opening the door to sexual identities being confused.

As a result, near the turn of the century we began to see the gay lifestyle become legitimized in mainstream culture through two of the major mountains - arts and entertainment and media. When actress Ellen DeGeneres kissed another woman on a national television sitcom in 1997, it became a tipping point in culture. This led to more open expression of gay-themed movies, including the recent Brokeback Mountain, featuring two gay cowboys, and the 2008 movie Milk, which honored the gay rights movement and one of its pioneers in an attempt legitimize gay rights as the civil rights movement did for civil rights.

Even kids were not immune to the new onslaught of the gay agenda, when in October of 2007 the major character in the Harry Potter books and movies, Albus Dumbledore, master wizard and headmaster of Hogwarts, was revealed to be gay.

This is how the frog in the kettle gets hotter and hotter, until one day we wake up and realize we have totally lost the culture. Deception has taken root and become mainstream in the gay movement, convincing even churchgoers that maybe people are actually born gay. The estimated 3% of the population is now dictating what the 97% should accept. This reveals the power of the media and arts and entertainment to shift public opinion by a small percentage of people operating at the top of these cultural channels.

There have been several tipping points in American society that are landmarks where our frog felt the heat go up several degrees.

In 1963, prayer in schools was ruled unconstitutional. This became a major tipping point in our nation. God made sure we knew it was this activity that began a decline in the moral fiber of our nation, as there is a very distinct declining curve that can be graphed off major societal ills that began to be evidenced since 1963.

The Baby Boomer generation has not done a very good job during our spiritual watch over the nation. Ten years after prayer was banned in school, conservative Christians lost one of the most important battles when abortion was legalized in 1973, as the result of the famous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case.

It's now hard to tell the difference

Influence in culture is only possible when those who want to exert influence have a message and a life that others see and desire. This is the nature of a truly transformed life. Unfortunately, there is evidence that Christianity in America has lost its power and its influence at the foundation level. UnChristian authors David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons conducted extensive research to determine our influence on culture. Their findings are disturbing.

"In virtually every study we conduct, representing thousands of interviews every year, born-again Christians fail to display much attitudinal or behavioral evidence of transformed lives. For instance, based on a study released in 2007, we found that most of the lifestyle activities of born-again Christians were statistically equivalent to those of non-born-again. When asked to identify their activities over the last thirty days, born-again believers were just as likely to bet or gamble, to visit a pornographic website, to take something that did not belong to them, to consult a medium or psychic, to physically fight or abuse someone, to have consumed enough alcohol to be considered legally drunk, to have used an illegal, nonprescription drug, to have said something to someone that was not true, to have gotten back at someone for something he or she did, and to have said mean things behind another person's back. No difference."

These findings are a contrast to what took place during the Roman Empire. We know that during that time, Christians took care of the terminally ill at the risk of their own lives and were such a testimony to the love and power of Christ in a life that they drew people into faith by their very different lifestyle. Constantine proclaimed Rome the Holy Roman Empire, not for political reasons, but merely stating the obvious that was being demonstrated by the people. Christians transformed culture by the way they lived. We are called to model what Christ taught. If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? (I John 4:20).

How failure in marriage got us to this place
In the last 50 years the Christian evangelical church has allowed the value of covenant in marriage to be exchanged for contract in marriage. We no longer honor the marital covenant and we make it easy for marriages to break up and reproduce the same pain through remarriage, which also violates scripture. There is no longer shame for divorce or remarriage in the church. The problem has become epidemic and so divorce has become a manufacturing mechanism for dysfunction in society. Consequently the church has lost its moral authority to speak on this issue. Also, the failure of the Catholic Church regarding sexual abuse contributes to the failed authority within the Catholic Church.

We have compounded this by the church making homosexuality as the unpardonable sin by judging and condemning those in this lifestyle. A friend of mine who was delivered from the gay lifestyle said to me one time, "If there was a divorce rate of less than 5%, you would not be talking about gay issues." It would be a non-issue. That's because healthy marriages produce healthy children with healthy identities.

Danny Wallace, friend and author of Masquerade which describes his journey to freedom from a gay lifestyle and speaks internationally on the topic, shares his insights about the issue:

"Homosexuality is what it is in this country because those of us who carry the beacon of hope for broken people have stood against the sin rather than the answer. We have the same problem in every instance where we have chosen to do the same. Abortion is no different. We were caught broad-side by the onslaught of changing legislation because those of us with the answer were concentrating on the "right or wrong"of the law while ignoring the brokenness within these young mothers. The same will stand to be historically true of homosexuality and gay marriage. I think that you and I both know that in a very short time period gay marriage will be legal in all 50 states. In a very short period of time this will be a continued religious argument, but nonetheless it will be signed, sealed, delivered, and done.

Danny further explained his findings on the pattern of becoming gay. "You will never find a person who has a healthy relationship with their father who is gay. In 100% of the cases being gay is rooted in the failure of a father to love that child and validate him/her during their growing up years."

Wounds can happen so early that a person can believe they were born that way. One thing is for sure, God never made a person gay. That would violate what the Bible teaches.

There's only one way to deal with the root problem; that is to heal marriages and return to covenant commitments in marriage learn to love those who are caught in a web of bondage. Only then will we see a reduction in the gay population.

A 2009 report on the state of marriage in America was published by the Institute for American Values in America. In this report we got a snapshot of the health of families and marriages in America.

Over the last forty years, marriage has become less common and more fragile, and the proportion of children raised outside intact marriages has increased dramatically. Between 1970 and 2008 the proportion of children living with two married parents dropped from 85 percent to 66.7 percent, according to census data. About three-quarters of children living with a single parent live with a single mother.

These important changes in family structure stem from two fundamental changes in US resident's behavior regarding marriage: increases in unmarried childbearing and high rates of divorce. More than a third of all US children are now born outside of wedlock (39.7 percent), 71.6 percent for African American babies and 27.8 percent for whites and other ethnic groups.

The divorce rate in America is 45-50 percent for first marriages, 60-67 percent for second marriages, and 70-73 percent for third marriages, according to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology in Springfield, Missouri.

"Sixty-five percent of young adults whose parents divorced had poor relationships with their fathers (compared to 29 percent from non-divorced families)," according to a study on family life released by sixteen of the top scholars on the importance of marriage.

The Washington Times described the impact of divorce on children. "More than half of American teens have grown up with parents who rejected each other, which bodes ill for the nation's future leadership, productivity, wealth, and well-being, says a new national report on American families. Only 45 percent of teens, aged 15-17, have grown up from birth with their married, biological parents, says the new US Index of Belonging and Rejection."

Divorce is the entry point of dysfunctional and wounded lives that often lead to aberrant behaviors in human beings in each new generation. Unless there is a stop-gap somewhere in the cycle, more and more expressions of aberrant behavior will be the result until we end up like the Roman Empire and disintegrate from within.

The church and the Christian Right exhibit hidden hypocrisies evidenced by their intensity against this particular sin, though they are very soft on divorce, adultery, greed, and materialism. Somehow this one sin gets isolated above the others that are equally damaging to society.

The Strategy of the Gay Agenda

In February 1988, a meeting was held with 175 gay activists in Warrenton, Virginia. Marshall Kirk, a Harvard-educated researcher in neuropsychiatry, and Hunter Madsen, who holds a doctorate in politics from Harvard and is an expert in persuasion tactics and social marketing, were the conveners of this meeting. In their book, After the Ball, a strategic battle plan to make being acceptable in the minds of Americans, said "AIDS gives us a chance, however brief, to establish ourselves as a victimized minority legitimately deserving of America's special protection and care. It generates mass hysteria of precisely the sort that has brought about public stonings and leper colonies since the Dark Ages and before. . . . How can we maximize the sympathy and minimize the fear? How, given the horrid hand that AIDS has dealt us, can we best play it?" This was the beginning of a public relations multi-year plan. They developed a public relations bible of the gay movement. They outline the key strategies for the movement in their book.

Their goals included:

Break current negative associations with our cause and replace them with positive associations.

Change what people actually think and feel. Re-frame the terms of the debate.

Seek desensitization and nothing more (until it doesn't matter any more).

Make it unlawful to discriminate against gays.

Public perception of the gay agenda

Seventeen Magazine has been doing a survey about the gay lifestyle for several years. To get an idea how effective the gay rights movement has been with public relations, one only needs to look at this survey of its readers compared to earlier years. Consider their 1991 survey, which revealed that 17 percent of their readers accepted homosexuality as appropriate. However, in their 1999 survey, after eight years of PR, the same survey said 54 percent accepted homosexuality as appropriate.

"I was born this way."

In 2011, pop artist Lady Gaga received three American Music Awards from three nominations for her smash hit "Born This Way". Millions of young people and adults under 40 heard the gay propaganda over the airwaves compliments of Lady Gaga.

CNN weekend anchor, Don Lemmon revealed in 2012 he was gay during an interview. During one of his interviews with someone else on a CNN broadcast he subtly commented to the interviewer that he knew he was born gay. Because of the power of media viewers often take what is said as truth. Our young people have especially bought this lie. Yet there is no scientific data that proves a person is genetically predisposed to be gay. This deception is played out regularly in the media with few willing to state the truth for fear of backlash from the gay community.

Most of us hear the rationale of gay activists that they are born gay rather than their sexual preference being an influence of how they were raised and the exposure to societal factors and childhood wounds that predisposed them to this lifestyle. After the Ball authors Kirk and Madsen made an amazing admission in their book: "We argue that, for all practical purposes, gays should be considered to have been born gay, even though sexual orientation, for most humans, seems to be the product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence." Here you have an amazing admission by gay leaders that "We are not born gay."

What is their ultimate goal? It isn't just to get acceptance. It is far more than that. David Kupelian explains: "The end game is not only to bring about the complete acceptance of homosexuality, including same-sex marriage, but also to prohibit and even criminalize public criticism of homosexuality. In other words, total jamming of criticism with the force of law. This is already the case in Canada and parts of Scandinavia."

However, being right about an issue has very little redemptive value in helping a gay person who we know is in bondage but may be unwilling to admit it.

How did Jesus deal with sexual sin?
We find one example in His discourse with the prostitute in the book of John.

"But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. At dawn he appeared again in the temple courts, where all the people gathered around him, and he sat down to teach them.The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group and said to Jesus, "Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women.Now what do you say?" They were using this question as a trap,in order to have a basis for accusing him.

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there. Jesus straightened up and asked her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?"

"No one, sir," she said.

"Then neither do I condemn you,"Jesus declared. "Go now and leave your life of sin" (John 8:1-11).

Jesus doesn't minimize the prostitute's sin; He challenges her to move beyond her sinful lifestyle now that a second chance is given to her. Jesus' unconditional love didn't give people a free pass to continue in their sin. He gave them an out for their sin.

In God We Trust? The moral issue. Does it even matter?

We must as a nation acknowledge that our national motto that is on every currency, In God We Trust, no longer represents the belief of the population or its leadership. Our beliefs are reflected in our elections, not our words. Our nation is living a lie. A nation cannot violate the values our Creator expressed in His instruction manual for living, the Bible, and expect God simply to turn His eye from evil. God said in His word to beware of calling things that are evil good.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter (Isa 5:20).

God doesn't change with the times, nor should the church or Christianity. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8). His cultural bar does not move up or down with the moral condition of that culture.

The sad truth is our nation has already become a secular nation. The values represented today among leadership, the media, and the majority reveal that we are a nation headed towards the way of Europe where God is no longer allowed in the public discourse of government. The idea that moral considerations should be part of the discussion is now taboo. As such, we can expect to see God remove His hand of protection if this trend continues. There is a remnant in the nation that still hold true to the absolutes of God's Word, but they are getting smaller in number.

How does God deal with the sins of a nation?

Israel's sin was the worship of idols. God judged them by allowing their enemies to defeat them, or He allowed liberal and unholy leadership to rise in power. In other words, the spiritual condition of the greater majority was given a leader that reflected their spiritual condition. So the more ungodly the people became the more they embraced leaders that reflected their values. We can see this taking place today in America. We are the frog in the kettle in which the water is gradually getting hotter and hotter until it is too late.

The cultural idol of today is tolerance. Young people are reflecting more and more a belief system that is not based on any absolutes. Their God is the god of tolerance. "You do what you want as long as it doesn't affect me." We have made personal rights a national idol regardless of the moral consequences. Israel made the same mistake regarding foreign idols.

Some liberals have gone so far as to state that being a Christian today is synonymous with being a bigot. Any opinion that reflects an absolute view that may not be a view of the public majority is often construed as being narrow minded for a "progressive society". This is especially true among the liberal media today.

Does a nation answer to God?

David Barton has written extensively on the Christian foundations of America and its accountability for its sins. "This was a question the American founders dealt with on the floor of the Constitutional Convention. They concluded that a nation doesn't have a spirit or a soul. Therefore when a nation dies, it is dead and won't be resurrected later to answer for its failures, as a person will be who does have a spirit and soul. GEORGE MASON said: "As nations cannot be punished or rewarded in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects Providence punished national sins by national calamities." Providence was commonly used by the founders to refer to God.

God's judgment on a nation because of its ungodly leaders is evidenced many places in the Bible. A couple of them are:

1. Because of the corruption of King Ahab and his wife Jezebel, the nation went without rain for three years. The righteous had to suffer too even though they had no part in it.

2. King David was normally a good King, but because of his disobedience to God when he numbered his army, a plague came upon the nation and wiped out 70,000 people. The Nation suffered because of the leader."

This is now the dilemma our government faces. Will it remove any moral component to the argument? It is clear this is the direction our government has taken. Just the mention of tying morality to the argument causes an uproar in the liberal media.

It all becomes a slippery slope when you remove the moral dimension. We will end up like Canada, making it unlawful to preach against homosexuality which could lead to the removal of a church's non-profit status if a pastor teaches what the Bible says, making it a hate crime for discrimination against a group of people. Government and businesses would now have to offer the same benefits as heterosexual couples.

Day of Reckoning

When God spoke to Abraham in Genesis 15 He described his plan for Abraham and the nation of Israel. He told him that he would bring him into the Promised Land after 400 years of slavery. He used an interesting terminology in describing one of the catalysts for this to begin. He said the iniquity of the Amorites rights has not yet complete, which would be the catalyst for the people of Israel to go into the Promised Land. The Amorites were a very ungodly people. God saw their sin as so great that He was going to use the Israelites to wipe out the Amorites. There is a place in nations where God begins to judge unrighteousness.

Now when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and behold, horror and great darkness fell upon him.Then He said to Abram: "Know certainly that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and will serve them, and they will afflict them four hundred years.And also the nation whom they serve I will judge; afterward they shall come out with great possessions.Now as for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried at a good old age.But in the fourth generation they shall return here, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete."

America is not immune to the judgment of God. We can expect God to judge the sins of our nation as our sins get greater and greater. Pray that God has mercy on our nation and that He will raise up a generation of righteous leaders and change agents that believe leadership must include morally based governance. God can shift the culture back to Himself in one day if His people get in alignment with Him and His ways. However, it always starts with us.

As Christ followers we are called to stand in the gap for the culture. So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one (Ezekiel 22:30). Will we in the body of Christ be up for the task?

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land (2 Chronicles 7: I4 ).